CAN I CONVERT MY BILLS, TRANSACTIONS AND RESTAURANT RESERVATIONS TO THE CLOUD?Why the Cloud is secure and preferred to save important accounting and bill information from our daily lives into a “virtual safety deposit box”By Rick Mark | Service Area Manager |
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The cloud takes on many forms today: from Dropbox to QuickBooks to Flixster to OpenTable and more. It seems that more and more of what we do each day is available on some sort of mobile device or our computers. Telephone calls are becoming far scarcer than ever and so is paper! But is it safe and what are the prime benefits? The most easy to recognize benefit of the cloud is the ability to store data electronically, away from your computer – where viruses and bad things can happen (like a crash). Recovering data can be very expensive, and losing it altogether – well let’s not go there. The cloud was built on the premise of redundancy and safely storing data. Today the cloud has expanded into fully operational business applications, personal management and more. Now, convenience is the buzzword when it comes to cloud considerations. The ease and convenience of electronic transactions of all kinds is another winning benefit. With the advent of today’s super tablets and fast connectivity, it takes longer to write checks, call a restaurant for a reservation, rent a movie at one of those rental stores (do they still exist?), and even make appointments for your automobile maintenance. It’s all about freeing up time to allow us to either relax more or work more. After all, the subtleties of our lives take up a lot of our time – getting in digital control is very important – efficiency is king! If you are one of those who want to embrace this technology or you have already started but don’t know how to get in deeper, let’s look at a few solutions that help to bridge the gap for you. The best timesaver out there has been around for a long while now – electronic banking. ALL major banks and many smaller ones too, offer electronic bill pay, account management, and even have dedicated and secured mobile apps for your iPhone and many Android phones too. You can pay bills at will or schedule fixed payments automatically – imagine, never writing a check again! These services are very secure now, compared to what they were 4-5 years ago – and you can take the info with you on your phone…how cool is that? What about the need to get reservations quickly? Not only getting them at the time you need them, but at the time you WANT to be at the restaurant. As an example, in recent travels, I called a restaurant for a reservation (the day before in fact) and could not get a reservation at the time, or timeframe, wanted. I remembered OpenTable and installed the APP on my phone and searched for places to eat at the time we wanted. Would you believe the restaurant we wanted originally had a spot open, suddenly? I quickly made the reservation and the next day – we were very happy and enjoyed the meal! So whatever you think you can do manually – look into the digital way of doing the same task. You may be very surprised at the quantity of minutes you can save. For more information or to inquire about this topic, email us.
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